The stranger sitting beside you can share three hours without entering your biography.

You can spend hours beside someone in complete proximity and never enter each other’s story. Shoulders touching, the same air, the same delays, and not a single fact exchanged, which shows how independent physical closeness is from knowing anybody. Presence and intimacy have almost nothing to do with each other.

The useful inference concerns the people you are close to daily. Sharing a house or an office does not by itself produce knowledge of someone, and it is possible to spend years adjacent to a person you have stopped asking anything. One real question this week, to someone you see constantly, is worth more than the hours.